


endurance

by raffinit



Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Breeding, F/M, Joel and Tess share a particular kind of secret desire, Pregnant Sex, domesticity meme fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 17:19:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7692922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raffinit/pseuds/raffinit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>domesticity meme fill for 'pregnant sex' which kind of devolves into Feels</p>
            </blockquote>





	endurance

One night - and she’s not quite sure what comes over him - he’s fucking her hard, like he always does, they both love it rough, and she’s staring up at him with heat in her eyes, groaning as he fucks into her deep and she feels his hips moving quick, knows he’s getting closer to his release -

and he pulls out,

turns her onto her knees,

pulls her hips back against him hard,

and fills her.

The feeling of it is so shocking that she collapses, splays her legs out and lets the come drip down her thighs. It’s been a long time since she’s let him come inside her, and she’s almost forgotten the feeling of it; how she feels it so deep inside of her, how hot and sticky, the rush and flow of it. It drips out of her when he pulls out, breathing hard in that heavy, almost rumbling way of his, the way he does after sex. 

“Wh- was that, big guy, hm?” she inquires, gasping for air, as soon as she manages to turn herself over. She’s sore, and it feels strange to know that his come is inside her. It makes her belly coil with heat all over again, and she crosses her legs almost reflexively. She wants to keep it inside, and she doesn’t know how that makes her feel. 

“Sorry,” he tells her, panting too. “Sorry, I don’t know what -” He gulps his breath down; he knows he’s still hard, and something about her particular tightness around him and the way she’d shuddered as her thighs splayed wet and open for him, it had made him want to take her like that. 

Her eyes are hot when her hand comes up to turn his head gently; she stares at him. “Do it again.” she tells him in that husky post-coital voice she adopts, and how could he say no to that?

He doesn’t need any more encouragement; she gets on her knees, rests on her elbows, feels her back arch so naturally and even the thought of how naturally she’s doing this, getting in this position, is nearly too much. She’s used to Joel taking control in the bedroom; ordinarily Tess prefers a power play, at least some kind of interplay, and they do that sometimes, but mostly with Joel she’s content to let him take the reins and do what he will with her. It’s nice to have that release - she’s so on top and in control in the rest of her life that it’s cathartic to have him be rough with her, to have his cock shoved in her spreading her wide -

and it’s fucking  _ hot. _

She groans when he rocks into her, and he seems to find his rhythm quickly - maybe it’s how slick she is, with their come mixed together, but he ruts into her hard, begins to pump inside of her so fast that she has to hold to the sheets to stay put, her hips moving involuntarily with the movement of his. Slapping skin against skin; his big hands grip her hips and her ass and move her to him, keep them locked together and connected. 

He doesn’t often take her on her knees, either. One of her favorite positions is for him to press in behind her, hold one of her legs up and enter her that way; against a wall, perhaps, on the bed with her legs high, wrap her legs around him and ride him - any of those, she’s used to, but on the knees...well, they haven’t really explored the feeling of that yet. 

It feels so short before he comes inside of her again, and she’s so delirious with pleasure that the room swims and she can’t remember to think  _ he’s gonna get you pregnant like this _ and even if she had she suspects she might be even more turned on by the thought. 

Relinquishing control. All those themes at play again. She ignores them.

He comes inside her three more times, more stamina than she’s ever known either of them to have. That’s not to say they don’t occasionally take a day to fuck, to stay in bed and explore each other, be rough and soft at once; but five times, he shoots his come inside of her, and by the time he lays back exhausted with his last load spent deep within her, she feels so full she can barely move, and sore as all hell. 

“Holy shit,” she’s panting, her arm splayed over his chest and the other over her pale stomach. She’s so thin, even she can admit it even if she always says she ate more than she did, but with the fullness of him inside her she can feel almost a tiny valley and bump, a hill of her lower belly where she knows his come fills her. She can feel it dripping slowly onto the sheets, clenches herself involuntarily to keep it inside. She wants it inside. As much as she’d like to pretend she doesn’t, she wants a reminder of him all the time, and inside her is the perfect place. 

“Sorry, Tess,” he says again, half-grinning at her, “I don’t - don’t know where that came from, even,” and she grins. She presses a little closer to him; her body fits perfectly with his, into his side with her head rested comfortably in the crook of his neck, where she can feel the scruff of his beard rough and kind on her forehead where he kisses her. 

After about a month she starts to suspect it. It’s with a wry smile that she realizes she’s not bleeding this month, and it’s already a week late; she should have expected it, of course. That much come? That many times? It’s almost comical. But where are they supposed to find condoms in a world like this? She’s always thought maybe she’s just luckily (or unluckily?) not so fertile. Of course Joel’s sperm would be a straight-shooting arrow right to the target and of course he’d manage to knock her up even if he only gets the chance to come inside her once a damn year.

She doesn’t ever  _ tell  _ him, per se. That would be far too cliche for them - could she ever imagine herself standing in front of him, digging her heel into the threadbare rug nervously, biting her lip and avoiding his eyes,  _ I - I’m - I’m pregnant _ , as if it was some kind of death sentence/marriage proposal combo, and he would tear up and take her in his arms and kiss her and they’d make dramatic promises to each other about surviving for the baby, and then he would get down on one knee and propose to her -

No. 

Instead it’s rather implied, because after about two months, Tess throws up once daily, in the very early morning when the light is blue and cold. He doesn’t even freak out the first time, to his credit - no fussing about whether or not she has a deadly illness contracted in the close quarters of a QZ, no asking her what it was she ate. He just stands by her side and rubs her back, until she’s finished, and then he helps her wash her face and brings her a glass of water to rinse with. Joel gives her a mint leaf from the windowsill to chew, so that she doesn’t have to taste bile on her tongue, and then he carries her back to bed. It feels good, and also it feels like nobody can see, and she appreciates that. It makes it even easier for her to curl in on herself in his warm, strong arms, to fall asleep again when he sets her on the mattress and covers her with all the blankets, wraps his body around hers, he’s so warm and she’s always so cold. 

After that, Tess knows he knows.

And this, of course, has its ramifications.

First of all, for at least the first three months, Joel flat out refuses to screw her - despite the fact that usually he says this whilst attempting to disguise a raging boner and usually she is spreading her legs and going  _ are you shitting me? really? LOOK AT YOU,  _ and he’s shaking his head and coughing and saying, muttering really, that he uh doesn’t wanna y’know hurt - do - anything.

It’s such a sweet refrain that she kisses him, but she doesn’t mention the fact that it’s sweet; he can imply that; instead she reassures him that his dick isn’t so  _ freakishly  _ long and gigantic that he’ll reach up inside her by accident and hit their developing child - but that he will end up being teased by her, endlessly, and if he does not fuck her right this instant on her knees she will take off all her clothes and rub her clit in front of him until he does.

(That one - that gets him. Right away.)

The morning sickness goes away relatively quickly once she hits three months - she may be skinny but she’s wiry and Tess has always thought her body had good reaction time, good at killing illnesses and restoring itself to working order. Working-order for Tess is essentially horny, and the added bonus of pregnancy -

how strange, isn’t it? She thinks about it sometimes at night. She’s still so small, still feels that she is small and that there can’t possibly someday be a kid who weighs at least six or seven pounds somewhere on her person, like she’ll just decide to give birth someday and the baby will come out about ten times bigger than her stomach. But there is a decided roundness to her belly, a curve now, even if it’s not more than what one might refer to as a ‘bump’. A speed bump, she refers to it as to Joel, and he grins, presses in behind her, and spans his hand over the tiny convexity of her skin, smooth and cool.

Four and a half months, she’s lying on the bed doing up some orders one evening, by candlelight; what’s 441 + 871? Fuck, what she wouldn’t give for a fucking calculator some days. Bring back one thing from before the outbreak; give me the goddamn calculator. “Twelve hundred aaaand,” she pauses momentarily, stares down at the speed-bump stomach, and then it feels almost as if she has some kind of indigestion, but that’s not it and she knows it. 

“Twelve hundred,” she attempts once more, and pauses expectantly, but there is nothing more and she passes it off as aftereffects from the canned baked beans she had for lunch, and indeed, until Joel climbs into bed with her and they blow out the candles, she doesn’t feel it again. 

But something about their baby must recognize its daddy’s voice, because as soon as he rumbles that tonight they can do anything she wants, she feels it again.

“I’ll take you up on that,” she says, “but wait now, and feel this, hm?”

It becomes one of Joel’s favorite activities. He likes to sit with her practically in his lap, his arms around her waist (or where her waist once was, anyways) and feel when their baby is awake, the little kicks and gentle nudges and repositioning against his palm. At some point Joel hums a song, in that lovely molasses-rich tone of his, and she teases him about if he’s singing to her or the baby.

And, of course, because it is Joel, he also becomes intensely protective. Primally so.

Not - as if he wasn’t before.

But still.

Despite the fact that she borrows his shirts now so as to appear unpregnant, because that could potentially be a very extreme disadvantage and Joel and Tess are not going to make little spring-green card announcements to tell everyone that they’re hearing the pitter-patter of little feet in their lives, Joel is even more viciously protective of her than ever. He has taken to stepping in front of her at every turn, and eventually she gently moves him out of the way -  _ old man, I’m gonna run into you, okay, stop doin’ that. Jesus.  _ and squeezes his shoulder affectionately so that he know she does not mean the acerbity of her words. 

They also fuck.

Quite often.

It’s like once she informed him that she wanted it  _ more _ than usual, not less, and that they weren’t going to hurt each other, he suddenly developed the libido of twenty men. Not that she’s complaining, in any way; she feels quite comfortable, most happy, when he’s buried deep inside her, thrusting either slow or fast, and she feels his breath as he pants against her neck, as they kiss messily when he comes inside her. That’s the other thing - she gets to feel his come in her every time now that they don’t worry for conception, and it’s addictive, being filled up by him, listening to the sounds he makes just before spilling his load inside her. One of her favorite activities is to walk, with legs slightly splayed because she aches after the best fuckings, gaping open and letting his come dribble down her thighs.

It is a continual theme, the primal nature of it. Occasionally it coincides with very intimate and almost frivolous acts, thin threads of satin and silk that crisscross in the burlap of their everyday life, where sometimes she can close her eyes and they are there together in a world where it is expected that these things would happen, where it is strange that each night she doesn’t take a bath and it is strange that she has not been to see the doctor. 

One night Joel fills the bath for her, with water heated to the perfect degree to soothe the ache in her hips and her back and shoulders. He climbs in with her; he’s even lit candles, for god’s sake. 

There are rose petals floating in her bathwater and it feels surreal, as if she has climbed into someone else’s life.

(Joel ignores the undercurrent, which is a mixture of  _ how can I possibly deserve this from you, hm?  _ and  _ this does not fit in our world and I am afraid _ .)

His arms span across the gentle swell of her stomach; their baby is asleep, she can tell, and she doesn’t want to wake the little thing, so she leans back slowly, allows herself to melt into his touch, into the strength and the broad warmth of his chest against her. He holds her close, and she can smell the flowers, such a gentle scent enfolding them. Candlelight. Outside quiet, a few droplets of rain in the cooling air. She closes her eyes and hides her face softly in his neck, nuzzles him, and she feels his kisses at her hair, the ends of which turn dark dark dark brown in the bathwater, and float out to reveal the strands of auburn-red. He tells her every day that she glows; at night when they sleep she feels his hand combing reassuringly metronomic through her hair, which grows fast and soft and she’s started tying back because it bothers her to have it all over on her shoulders. 

“Thank you,” she mumbles to him, feeling like she’s asleep but knowing that she’s not quite tired. Perhaps it is because she experiences the peace of sleep. Especially with him. Maybe she always experiences it, and needs this quiet, needs the candlelight to really see it. Feel it.

“Anythin’ for you, hon,” he tells her, and she feels the familiar, recurring lump in her throat whenever Joel says things like this. He will tell her a thousand times over about  _ all the shit he’s done  _ and about how, in arguments  _ neither of them are good people, Tess,  _ and it always ends with him affirming that he’s not at all, that she is and he’s not, and Joel tends to withdraw from her during arguments; he goes to a place that she cannot reach, where she will hear and process his words and he will do the same but when she grasps for him he is not quite there.

And then, because he is Joel and because he is at his core an upstandingly decent man, despite having gone through possibly everything a soul could have gone through without shattering and scattering into many, many sharp pieces, he will say something like this.

_ Anythin’ for you, hon.  _ He sounds tired, but he is sincere. He is always sincere. She needs that. She needs any remaining vestige of sincerity in this life.  _ Anythin’ for you.  _ Without even a second thought. And that is why, despite Joel’s repeated assurances that he will never deserve her, Tess makes it a point to always strive to be good enough to deserve even one more second with a man like that. 

“Love you.”

“Love you too. Got somethin’ else for you, if you want it.” She doesn’t open her eyes but she smiles; 

“‘s it that you’re a little happy to see me? Because I’m feeling -”

but he turns back, from reaching over the side of the tub. It’s one of their crappy plastic glasses that is imbued with scratches set deep into the surface. Inside are three ice cubes and strong, sweet tea.

“After,” she grins. “You share. Know you love this shit.”

“‘s good shit,” he says, mock-offended.

“It is.”

They sip it together, lie close until the bathwater goes lukewarm, and dry each other in the finest, shittiest, softest most threadbare towels they can find.


End file.
